Second Nature

Epizódy

• E177 Asger Strange-Olesen: The Additionality Problem 11.06.2026 1h 38min

  Asger Strange Olesen has spent 15 years building context most people in this space only claim to have. Carbon developer, EU Climate Directorate, FSC Global Chief Climate Officer, now heading climate and biodiversity at IWC — a $6bn forestry asset manager backed by BNP Paribas. He has been inside the policy rooms, the certification bodies, the investor meetings, and the forest itself. This conversation goes to places the sector tends to avoid. Why additionality — the foundational rule of the c...
• E176 Richard Kelly & Robert Guest: Britain Is Running Out of Trees 04.06.2026 1h 33min

  Richard Kelly and Robert Guest were employees 63 and 64 at Foresight. They built a £150 million portfolio in 12 months, took it public on the London Stock Exchange during COP26, watched interest rates destroy their share price through no fault of their own, delisted — and then rebuilt. Within months of going private, their three biggest shareholders rolled straight back in. That's not a recovery story. That's a vote of confidence in people. This is one of the most complete journeys Second Nat...
• E175 Insurance Round Table: The Market Nobody Talks About 28.05.2026 1h 39min

  Everyone talks about capital flows into nature. Nobody talks about what has to be true before that capital will move. Insurance isn't a nice-to-have in natural capital markets — it's the load-bearing wall. Without it, the deals don't close, the banks don't lend, the corporates don't buy. With it, you get carbon credits on a balance sheet as assets instead of liabilities. You get BNG units trading like real infrastructure. You get developers who can actually monetise their projects without loc...
• E174 Ed Thorne & Greg Robson: Relationships Can't Be Automated 21.05.2026 1h 45min

  Greg Robson and Ed Thorne founded Sand River three years ago with a simple but radical premise: the companies solving the ecological crisis are the best businesses on earth — they just haven't been funded that way. Both came from operational backgrounds. Neither had the next great idea to save nature. What they had was the judgment to find the people who did. This conversation goes deep into how you invest in a market that barely exists yet, what you actually look for in a founder, why valuat...
• E173 Tim Christophersen: The $7 Trillion Secret Destroying The Planet 14.05.2026 1h 31min

  Tim Christophersen had a UN contract running to 2038. Diplomatic passport. Lifetime security. A ringside seat to every major environmental agreement on the planet. He left. That decision tells you something important about where this man thinks the real leverage is — and where it isn't. He's spent 30 years building the architecture the world runs on: the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, the global biodiversity framework, the early scaffolding of nature markets. He's written one of the form...
• E172 David Gerard: Wonder Is a Business Strategy 07.05.2026 1h 49min

  David Gerard has spent 30 years learning how to make people forget to be cool. From FAO Schwartz at six years old to the highest-rated show in Las Vegas, from Google's marketing floors to coaching Fortune 500 CEOs on stage presence, David has built a career at the intersection of wonder, attention, and human connection — and in an AI world that's automating everything else, that intersection has never been more valuable. Rich and David go deep on what magic actually teaches you about communic...
• E171 Troy Carter: AI Will Save the Forests 06.05.2026 1h 9min

  Carbon markets are broken. Not because the projects don't work — but because nobody has decided they should. Troy Carter, founder of Earthshot Labs, has spent five years building the end-to-end infrastructure to get serious money into reforestation and conservation projects worldwide. He's watched the market go hot, go cold, and watched good operators go bankrupt for reasons that have nothing to do with their work. Now he thinks the whole fragmented, mistrustful, acronym-ridden industry is ab...
• E170 Dimitri Theocharis: The Hyperscalers Are Coming 05.05.2026 1h 22min

  Dimitri Theocharis grew up watching an economy collapse. So he left. New York, San Francisco, Harvard Business School. Then something unexpected: a climate startup in the UK that needed someone who understood both money and markets. Dimitri is now CEO of Ecologi, a platform at the intersection of carbon accounting, nature-based funding, and the voluntary carbon market — working with over 16,000 businesses and betting on a consolidation wave that will reshape the entire industry before 2030. W...
• E169 Tommy Ricketts: The Reckoning Is Coming 30.04.2026 1h 21min

  Tommy Ricketts is the co-founder and CEO of BeZero Carbon — the company that built the world's first carbon ratings agency, walked into COP26, and got told they were the single biggest risk to the carbon market. That was 2021. By 2023, the projects their critics were defending were in freefall. Tommy spent years at Bank of America training under a number-one ranked analyst, pitching ideas to hedge funds whose entire job was to intellectually destroy you. That background — combined with growi...
• E168 BNG Round Table: This is Still the First Chapter 23.04.2026 1h 18min

  Britain's biodiversity market was two years old when someone tried to kill it. Not deliberately — just through the spectacular collision of political timing, an overloaded planning system, and a regulatory bottleneck that hit at the worst possible moment. In this episode, I sit down with three of the people who were there — Emma Toovey of Environment Bank, Fiona Milden of Oxygen Conservation, and Alexa Culver of RSK — the day after the Land Use Framework dropped, for the most honest conversat...
• E167 Paul Beavis: Why I Left the Greatest Wines in the World 16.04.2026 1h 2min

  Paul Beavis ran a €90 million global champagne business. He was the face of one of the world's most prestigious drinks brands. And he walked away from all of it. What he built next took three years of searching every great wine region on earth, 178 attempts to name a single product, and a back vintage tasting at Claridge's that nobody in the industry thought was possible. Wild Idol is the alcohol-free wine that serious wine drinkers are quietly switching to. This is the story of how it got ...
• E166 Martin Berg: Nature Is Becoming a $1BN Business 09.04.2026 1h 24min

  A $1 billion bet on nature sounds like impact. It’s actually something far more uncomfortable. Martin Berg isn’t guessing where this goes—he’s building it. From inside global finance to running a $1BN natural capital platform, this is what happens when markets collide with ecosystems. Land becomes strategy. Carbon becomes currency. Biodiversity becomes… investable. But beneath the ambition sits tension. Investors want returns, not ideals. Corporates want certainty, not risk. And the market? I...
• E165 Dimple Patel: Stop Waiting For Permission 02.04.2026 1h 26min

  Dimple Patel didn't arrive at the CEO chair via the usual route. She grew up on a council estate in the north of England, the daughter of immigrants who had their house burnt down and opened the shop the next morning anyway. She got to Cambridge on scholarships, traded through the 2008 financial crisis at Goldman Sachs, scaled a coffee chain to 37 stores and sold it to private equity, pivoted into tech, exited a second company days before the consumer market collapsed — and then walked into t...
• E164 Ian Simm: Nature Is The Next Big Trade 26.03.2026 59min

  Can investing help solve environmental challenges — while still delivering strong returns? In this episode of the Oxygen Conservation Podcast, Rich Stockdale speaks with Ian Simm, Founder and CEO of Impax Asset Management. For more than two decades, Ian has been investing in companies that enable the transition to a more sustainable economy — from renewable energy and water infrastructure to smart materials and pollution control. Today, Impax manages around £25 billion on behalf of institutio...
• E163 Vian Sharif: Finance, AI and the Future of Nature 19.03.2026 1h 6min

  What happens when financial markets finally realise nature isn’t external to the economy — but fundamental to it? In this episode of the Oxygen Conservation Podcast, Rich Stockdale speaks with Vian Sharif, Founder of NatureAlpha — a company using AI and environmental data to help financial institutions understand how their investments impact the natural world. Today, NatureAlpha’s insights inform institutions representing over $25 trillion in assets, helping investors identify risks linked to...
• E162 Will Foulkes: Retail Is Sitting On Untouched Billions 12.03.2026 1h 10min

  What if the fastest way to fund nature isn’t through donations… but through the global payments system? Will Foulkes left elite structured finance at a Magic Circle law firm to build something radical: a “green margin” embedded into everyday transactions that automatically funds nature restoration. From adding 1p to supermarket products, to integrating directly into Europe’s largest payment processor, this conversation goes far beyond sustainability theory. It’s about rewiring capitalism itse...
• E161 Lara Salam & Doris Koeck: We Built a Nature Algorithm 05.03.2026 1h 13min

  Everyone thinks Oxygen Conservation is a land company. It’s not. It’s a data platform from its absolute DNA. In this rare behind-the-scenes conversation, Rich sits down with the team building the engine that powers every acquisition, every restoration plan, and every carbon model. From screening every square metre of the UK using 50+ datasets, to deploying drones capturing 3cm resolution imagery, to building digital terrain models and LiDAR maps that expose what the naked eye can’t see — this...
• E160 Rob Gardner: Floods Will Break Britain 26.02.2026 1h 7min

  Rob Gardner isn’t trying to make nature sound good. He’s trying to make it investable. As CEO of Rebalance Earth, he’s building the UK’s first natural capital asset manager — structuring real revenue models around flood mitigation, water resilience, peatland restoration, and even oyster reefs. With a £25m cornerstone portfolio backed by West Yorkshire Pension Fund, this is institutional capital moving into ecosystems — not as philanthropy, but as infrastructure. We explore how ecosystem servi...
• E159 Giles Bristow: The Water Crisis Was Engineered 19.02.2026 1h 15min

  What does real leadership look like when the country’s rivers are polluted, the public is angry, and the system feels stuck? Giles Bristow, CEO of Surfers Against Sewage, has lived both sides of the fight — from environmental lawyer inside the corporate machine to leading one of the UK’s most recognisable grassroots movements. This is not a comfortable conversation. Rich and Giles go head-to-head on profit versus public good, the ethics of finance in an environmental crisis, and whether the l...
• E158 Mark Clayton: Is Your Bank Funding Extinction? 12.02.2026 1h 38min

  Most banks talk about values. Very few are willing to let those values shape decisions. Mark Clayton, CEO of Triodos Bank UK, leads a bank that treats impact as a discipline, not a slogan. Having worked at the heart of big finance, he understands how neutrality, risk, and growth are used to avoid responsibility — and what it takes to do things differently. This conversation goes inside the real trade-offs of values-led banking: how credit decisions are made, why nature-based solutions challen...